Elia Alba (Domincan Republic)

was born in New York City of Dominican parents. She is a multi-media artist, working in sculpture, photography and video. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 where she graduated magna cum laude in Philosophy and Literature. She is also a fellow of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She has exhibited in various national and international institutions and fairs, for example, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Whitebox, ARCO 2002, ArtBasel Miami, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, the Science Museum in London and the RISD Museum in Rhode Island. Solo shows include Jersey City Museum, and Atlantic TransArt, Chile. Her awards have included the Artists-in-Residence Fellowship from the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum Van Lier Foundation Fellowship, Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Queens, New York.

Title of work:La Jaba
video, 2004, 6:00
In collaboration with Nicolás Dumit Estévez

This video refers to the Banana Dance performed by Josephine Baker in Paris in 1926. The word “jaba” is a negative informal expression from the Dominican Republic that is the equivalent to the term “high yellow” used here in the United States, meaning a very light skinned black person. In this video, the performance artist Nicolás Dumit Estévez wears a skirt similar to the one worn by Josephine Baker in her dance and the mask is that of my face. However, instead of bananas, the skirt is made up of miniature doll heads of various ethnic races. By re-enacting this performance, I wanted to make reference to this historical act, which was about white Parisian culture consuming the acts of a black female body, but in presenting a man in the guise of Josephine Baker, I wanted to reconsider the original narrative of the Banana Dance, which eroticized the black, female body and the consummation of such.